The Bionic Bride

Recently I was flipping through a People Magazine while I was at the gym, as I often like to do, when I noticed a tiny box in the table of contents of a beautiful, blonde young women standing in front of a mirror in an exceptional wedding gown. The title in the box read “The Bionic Bride”. With a name like that I of course I had to read it (always researching those blog post possibilities!). If you are a person who gets emotional over inspirational stories like I am grab a Kleenex box, it’s about to get emotional!


The insert in People magazine was actually a follow up from a story they first published last spring about a 22-year-old girl named Ally Smith. She was college freshman and star athlete at Texas A&M in 2006, when she was diagnosed with progressive heart disease. Her heart and her health were fading fast, and she wasn’t expected to live more than a year. Her condition was so dire, she wasn’t strong enough to wait very long for a heart transplant. Instead, doctors inserted a medical device that pumped the blood through her body, just as her heart would, allowing her heart to rest and potentially repair itself. She survived the surgery to implant the device, and the difficult recovery afterward, giving her a new lease on life.

This was a good thing because she and her fiancé were planning their wedding. Ally had met her boyfriend as a freshman, before she got sick. He loved her so much, and despite her declining health, proposed to her in 2008 saying he wanted to marry her regardless. With the device implanted, she and her fiancé walked down the aisle last spring, her in a beautiful ballroom gown with “electric blue” cowboy boots!

That was the original story published in People magazine. The follow up in the People magazine I read stated in early 2011, Ally once again took a turn for the worse. Her heart had been recovering, and the implant was helping buy her time, but in a very short amount of time her heart once again began to fail, as were her kidneys, liver, etc. She needed a new heart, fast. In mid-February of this year, Ally was fortunate to receive a new heart and is recovering well. Having become attached to the device that kept her alive for so many years, one of her first realizations upon waking up was that she would now live her life no longer as “the Bionic Bride”. She was simply back to being a normal girl who was fortunate to marry the man of her dreams, albeit with this assistance of some modern medical technology.